Converse College, Milliken building grads of the future

Adam Orr Staff Writer @AdamROrr

Monday

Jul 16, 2018 at 5:25 PMJul 16, 2018 at 5:25 PM

Converse College President Krista Newkirk can summarize her job in very simple terms: It’s about using her faculty and staff to take bright young women, mold them with a liberal arts education and specialized skills and get them ready for the world they’ll face when they leave the campus.

That’s a mission Craig Haydamack, Senior Vice President for Human Resources at Milliken & Company, believes in. His staff is tasked with identifying and recruiting the men and women who’ll drive innovation at one of the Upstate’s most valuable companies.

Together they’re laying the framework, first envisioned as part of One Spartanburg, for a partnership that could benefit both college and company and lay a road map for helping the community hang on to more of its best and brightest.

“The college-to-business linkage here in Spartanburg probably isn’t as strong as it could be,” Haydamack said last week. “You’ve got this absolute wealth of talented people that our local two- and four-year schools are producing, but probably as many are leaving as are staying. We think this could be a way to better position students for careers, and maybe end up retaining a lot more of these kids right here.”

Connecting the pipeline

Since taking the reins at Converse more than two years ago, Newkirk has looked for ways to better integrate the college and its graduates into the local economy, she said.

She recognized at least part of that answer following conversations she’d had with Haydamack and other leaders as part of One Spartanburg’s talent development and retention group.

“Milliken’s such an integral part of the community, and we know they’re focused on ethics and diversity in their hiring process,” Newkirk said. “I said, ‘I know you don’t have enough women over there, so right here we are.' ”

Converse grads have skills and training in disciplines like chemistry, biology and other sciences that are natural fits for Milliken’s core businesses, like its floor coverings division, Newkirk said.

Newkirk and Haydamack worked in recent months to send Converse’s first four interns to Milliken for the summer, but that’s just the first step. Haydamack said the goal is to help students make smarter decisions about their futures as early as possible.

“The earlier we can help somebody determine the direction they want their career to go, the better decisions they’re going to be able to make to get there, as opposed to just jumping at something that looks interesting and seeing where it leads,” Haydamack said.

That’s why Haydamack said Milliken is going to be working regularly with Converse, and other area schools, to arrange job shadowing opportunities, and loan out Milliken personnel to work with students on real-world scenarios Milliken’s employees face on a day-to-day basis.

It’s a low-cost, high-impact way to expose students early on to different businesses and ideas, Haydamack said.

Both said they could see Converse students tackling portions of Milliken projects.

“They end up gaining this incredibly value real-world experience,” Haydamack said. “And it’s not so much that they even come up with a solution that works. It gives us a chance to see how they think and gives them experience that they can turn around and show to a prospective employer and say: ‘Here’s what I’ve done.”

Finishing school

Newkirk and Haydamack say the arrangement isn’t intended to be an exclusive one between Converse and Milliken, but the start of a conversation that will ultimately involve many Upstate schools and businesses.

Newkirk said she hopes it helps students understand the “language” they’ll need to speak following graduation.

She said today’s students are smart, ambitious and technically savvy, while perhaps also disconnected in a way previous generations were not. She recounted the story of a group of Converse students recruited as part of a phone-based “Thank-A-Thon.”

The idea was to have Converse students call up individuals who’d played a key role in the college’s success and thank them for their efforts. Newkirk said there was just one catch.

Today’s tech-savvy youth are more adept at text-based communication than voice conversations over the telephone.

“We realized some of these students were lacking a real comfort level speaking on the phone,” Newkirk said.

So Newkirk said they brought in a faculty member to direct students through the best ways to portray themselves on the phone, and Newkirk said that familiarization paid off. “If you smile on the phone, people can hear it,” Newkirk said.

She said partnerships with companies like Milliken can help both the students and the school identify where they need to improve, and fix it before they hit the work-a-day world.

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